This is said by someone who obviously hasn't done any real world application profiling. It's quite the opposite -- CPU is relatively rarely a limiting factor in desktop applications, dealing with the HDD very often is.
This is very often why adding more memory to a system makes it seem more responsive -- larger disk buffers, less need for disk based virtual memory.
Basically hard disks are very often *the* limitation; CPUs are fast.
"Competitors will be tested both before and after the competition to check that their caffiene levels are within an acceptable range. Expect the officials to be more pedantic this year, as everyone was disappointed when last year's gold medalist was stripped of his award after it was uncovered that he snuck 4 liters of Jolt into the event."
Trademarks are registered for different categories of trade. i.e. I can trademark Apple as a new type of car and this is just fine. I could also create a new fruit drink called Unix or a toilet papaer brand called SCO with no trademark problems.
Don't copy BeOS, don't copy Windows XP, don't copy Mac OS/X! Do something ORIGINAL! Do something new that is Linix/OSS from the ground up. Stop playing catch up and take the lead for once!
This is just pointless hubris. To quote Igor Stranvinsky, Good composers borrow, great composers steal.
This is to say that doing something original is pointless; building upon what has already been learned is the direction of progress.
All of these desktops have common elements for a reason -- it's a pretty decent way of navigating through a computer. Yes, of course innovation is nice and sometimes you want to temporarily ignore some of what you've learned to try a new angle on things, but the most certain way to fall out of any meaningful cometition is to start ignoring everything that your competitors have done right.
If you don't think that original ideas are coming out of the Linux desktop (and subsequently being copied on other platforms), then you aren't watching very carefully.
Wow, I'm floored that this was modded up to +5. Creativity alone does not make something art. I guess this is probably mostly the effect of the Slashdot crowd that would like to fancy themselves hackers and artists, but has little bearing on the world of art.
Anyway; it just happens that I was in a discussion for several hours about this last night. Here's the executive summary:
Art is something that happens by a creator when they consciously or subconsciously express something through their creation. It is an active process of expression, not something that merely has creative merit.
There's a difference between a clever technician and an artist. This isn't to say that forms not traditionally associated with art (i.e. programming) can't qualify to be art, but certainly most coding isn't art, despite requiring creativity. This same dichotomy exists in other fields -- think journalism vs. literature, graphic design vs. visual art, civil engineering vs. architecture.
Bzzt. Wrong. Nobody has ever given "millions of dollars to KDE". In fact IBM has certainly had more tangible contributions to the project.
I'm not anti-Lindows or anti-Michael, but this is a gross overstatement. To the best of my knowledge a few thousand dollars were given to the KDE League; this is a far cry from "millions". We of course appreciate the contribution, but it's important to keep things in perspective. KDE has never had a donation of anywhere close to a million dollars from any party.
we can make hard drive big enough that they are not a limiting factor for 99.99% of applications
hard disk IO speed is a limiting factor for most application
Add to this the fact that most data either is (a) speed critical or (b) does not compress well. i.e. database data you normally want very quickly, same for applications. The things that fill modern home computers are media files, which are already heavily compressed.
Free Software isn't software that you don't pay for. You must be new here.
Let's say you want to integrate i.e. Quicken / GnuCash into your business. There are features in there that are valuable to you and not available in any package (i.e. things specific to your workflow). Sure, you might have to pay one of the local geeks [EUR/$]1000 to hack that feature in, but you can't do that for any price with most proprietary software.
See point one again. If you want stuff from Free Software, you might have to pay for it. But I assure you that people exist that will cater to your whims for a price.:-)
The project should get more attention anyways, it's up there with Postgres (or maybe better) as a high-quality enterprise database (formerly SAP DB).
Ok, it seems that FirebirdSQL is based on InterBase which would potentially put it in the category of enterprisedatabases where SAP DB is. But most certainly Postgres is not in this category. Postgres is a fine database and it can be argued that it trumps MySQL and friends, but these are apples and oranges.
I'm not terribly familiar with InterBase, but for example SAP DB is in the same category as Oracle, DB2 and such. It's performance is slightly below those two, but it's safe to say it's in that category. Postgres is nice for your super-spiffy-webapplications and whatever, but drop a terabyte or two in there and see what happens.;-)
It's called branding. Ask your manager about it. He'll understand.
Re:Is KDE trying to be Windows?
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Insightful
First a few things to consider: most of us KDE developer folks don't use Windows -- at all. I used Windows XP for the very first time when I was home for Christmas.
Second, Windows has some very useful and well thought out features. I prefer to substitue copy with learned from. Windows has certainly borrowed many things from Unix land; we shouldn't be too arragant to learn from the things that they've done right.
The last, is a resounding, yes, we do aim to innovate and produce and authentic Unix desktop with all that is entailed by that. I think one of the most innovative examples of this is something like the KDE IO Slaves, which extend the Unix metaphor of everything is a file to exverything is a URL. Being able to use your file browser to copy things directly from an audio cd to a remove machine via scp -- all transparently -- is *really* cool, and I think very Unix like. Or how about regular expression support in many find type of places, or rather nice console, IRC, GPG apps; the list goes on.
For all of the talk about KDE being Windows like -- remember that it's developed by old-school Linux/Unix guys. We're all very comfortable at the CLI; the debate between XEmacs and Vim is a vigorous here as anywhere. KDE is and will remain an Open Source *nix desktop; ideally making such an environment so usable as to bring this environment we know and love to folks that traditionally wouldn't be able to use it.
Re:Random complaints
on
KDE 3.1 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, no RedHat packages, which is not surprising considering the 'treatment' that KDE was subjected to by RH.
No, this certainly isn't surprising. Redhat has always been bad about this, indeed in getting along well with KDE in general, the notable exception being Bero, who left Redhat full of sincere frustration over the worsening of the situation. He was the guy that typically produced the Redhat packages. I know that there's a new guy who's doing their KDE packaging, but I have no idea if he / Redhat intends to release updated KDE packages.
Also, I never managed to get the Win key mapped to anything in KDE 3.0.x. I wonder if the situation changed. As I recall, KDE wanted a 'Win' modifier and xmodmap did not have any knowledge of a modifier called 'Win'. Rather unfortunate.
Actually this is pretty easy if your keyboard is configured properly in X. You need to have it set to using a pc104 keyboard instead of the standard pc101. After that, mapping the key in the KDE shortcuts menu works beautifully.
Re:Better place sto donate
on
Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I just feel like I should note that in addition to being the author of the article and a general KDE hacker, I am active in KDE Edu which currently has 16 applications that will be part of the KDE 3.1 release this week, about half of them useful for the age range that you mention.
Giving to schools is a fine thing and needn't be exclusive to helping out KDE. In fact if every active KDE core developer were given a new computer, this at most might be enough for one school. In this case, there are probably about 20-ish (or less) core developers that could use upgrades. We're not talking about big numbers here.
Now lets say that one school switches to KDE / Open Source from MS desktops. The cost savings in that alone outweigh the cost of diverting machines which might have gone to schools to KDE developers. In fact there have been a good handful of schools switch to KDE based desktops -- dragging an Open Source envirionment with all of its Free tools and such behind it.
Remember the ideal is for people pushing technology in schools to keep in mind both hardware and software concerns; this is a partnership, not a competition. When you send in your hardware donation I'll even be glad to direct it to a KDE Edu developer.:-)
Ugh, after reading the other replies I must chime in with a resounding, NO, NO, NO!
It does not matter what they say on their page; if they have in fact released the project under the GPL, it can be used for commercial projects royalty free -- as long as those commercial users also uphold the GPL.
It is true that the copyright holder can release it under any license that they want to. This has nothing to do with that. If however they make their software available under an unmodified GPL -- which does permit commercial use -- then they can not modify that with another statement. Again, if they're releasing it under the GPL, it can be used for commercial use.
Trolltech was [mis-]used as an example. Trolltech, by releasing their code under the GPL does allow Qt's commercial use, royalty free, so long as the software that links to it conforms to the GPL -- in this case meaning that said software is also under the GPL.
However, said programmers can dual-license the code under the GPL (which allows for GPL compliant commercial use) and anything else. In this case, what Trolltech does is makes it so that owners of commercial licenses do not have to release their code in compliance with the GPL -- i.e. they don't have to release their code at all.
Oh, did I mention that the GPL allows commercial use?;-)
Yes, quite regularly in fact. There are a few major ways that this happens:
Porting or developing their own projects -- JFS is an often pointed to as an example
Sponsoring developers of Open Source projects -- I know at least one KDE developer that was paid to write a series of tutorials on KParts that were published on IBM's web site
. I recently saw something by the founder of Gentoo Linux as well.
Public Relations -- This is the big one. IBM lends Open Source and Linux more credability than any other company. They throw more resources into promoting Linu
x than any other company. At a time where most major tech companies are at the most passively supporting Linux, IBM is very actively promoting it, and it's the reason that a lot of other major players are paying attention to Linux
Again, you can't underestimate the effects that having IBM backing Linux has in a corporate environment. Intel and AMD are paying attention because of IBM, and I'd be that a lot of a big part of why MS has taken note of Linux lately is that competing with Linux means competing with IBM.
So yes, they're contributing back, but the most significant ways are not the conventional methods. They're in fact contributing something to Linux that no number of hackers can -- credibility.
Re:How about some more bug fixes?
on
KDevelop 3.0 beta 1
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· Score: 5, Informative
How about you do some bug fixes, or how exactly was it that you planned for these fixes to happen?
Really, I'm not trying to flame, but this is Open Source, and I will repeat the thing that has been said several times: We do this in our spare time. Please don't complain about what we do in our spare time.
This isn't to say that you can't get the bug fixed.
Report it!: (Too many people don't realize that reporting bugsis important and valued!)
Fix it yourself: Hey, that's what this is all about! This is the developers section, and a thread about a development tool. You've got the source, go for it!
Pay someone to fix it: Seriously. Everyone thinks this a catch all, but many of the KDE developers, myself included would be willing to fix bugs for a modest price. Put EUR/$ 50 behind your request, and it's likely to happen! Hell, send a 6 pack of beer and you're likely to have a new friend.
I'm just trying to put this in perspective. The KDE devopers specifically, and most OSS developers in general do this for fun in their spare time. And here's another little secret: there aren't many of us. I would guess that 90% of the Open Source software that currently being worked on is developed by less than 500 people (That's just developers; there are a lot of wonderful translators and documentors out there too.).
We really try to produce great software, and in fact I think we succeed, but if you care about the stuff, please, help out! Donate something: time, money, hardware, whatever. It will be infinitely more appreciated and fruitful than complaining on Slashdot.
Wow, uhm, no. I'm shocked that this got modded up to +4.
If patents only covered a single implementation of an invention, this would defeat the purpose that patents do and always have had.
Patents cover an idea -- an invention. In fact the idea of patents is that it produces a way to license that invention to other manufacturers, who of course will differ in the details of implementation.
By me saying a hardware patent I was attempting to differentiate between software patents. This is not a patent on an algorightm -- math -- but rather a patent on a way to build a specific type of hardware (and indeed an inovative one at that). If you want to build that type of hardware, as Intel does, you must license the patent from the patent holder.
Basically, all patents are patents on ideas: hardware, software, gumball machines. There is no such thing as patents on a specific implementation. The closest thing that I guess you might be getting mixed up with is copyright law for media, software, etc., but that doesn't apply to physical creations. (In copyright law, you have copyright over the text, code, etc. -- the implementation not the idea.)
I see a lot of comments on here whining about patents and the need for patent reform and all that jazz. Patents are not a bad thing! This is a hardware patent, not a software patent.
Here we have a typical case of the patent system working properly:
A smallish (relatively) company create an invention -- new hardware
A large company sees that, likes it, and decides to copy that invention
The smaller company sues for patent infringement, because hey, the big company didn't invent this
This is how things are supposed to work. Software patents are a completely different thing, but here we have a non-trivial hardware inovation that was patented and that patent was infringed upon. Please don't lump the two together under patent reform.
By way of KHotKeys you can map many useful KDE things onto gestures, or any DCOP call. DCOP is KDE's interprocess communication/scripting interface that really has a lot available. And Seli (the author) promises that this will find its way into the KDE 3.2 distrobution.
KDE users/gesture lovers give it a whirl! I currently have gestures mapped to start up Konq, Konsole and to lock my screen.
Why should the government pay for research and development of software under a license that allows Microsoft to take it, modify it (perhaps trivially, perhaps integrate it into the OS) and then sell it back to the US government and citizens for $big profits?
Because the government is stupid enough to buy it.
If the government pays for research and development of GPL'ed software, they are ensuring that the government, US citizens, and US corporations will always be free to use the fruits of that work, even after it has been extended. That's how I would prefer my tax dollars to be spent, thanks.
You're making a subtle flaw here. A BSD license would insure that you got everything that your taxes paid for and could then do anything that you want to with it. It wouldn't insure you that you would get access to things that your tax dollars didn't pay for.
Trust me, I would love to see all government funded software released under the GPL, which is what all of my software is under (well, some LGPL). However, I don't think that you can make a convincing argument that GPL'ed software is any more right for the government to produce than BSD'd software. In fact, as much as I would like to see the software GPL'ed, I think in this case (as much as it pains me to agree with Bill Gates) it is more fair to release the software under something closer to public domain like the BSD license, if not just putting it in the public domain. After all, shouldn't publicly produced software be, well, public?
Redhat isn't a software company. -- No really. Redhat sells support; they sell consulting; they sell pretty much anything that you'll pay money for that happens to be Linux related -- "solutions" and whatnot.
But they don't sell software. Sure they make a nominal amount of money off of selling boxes-o-software, but you just can't really sell something to geeks very easily that they can download.
I think that a marketing shift like they're doing is trying to funnel more people into the parts of their business model that allow them to hire that many people. Pretty much they're a huge consulting firm that just happens to find it convenient to maintain a distro that they have control over.
Slashdot Mirror
This is said by someone who obviously hasn't done any real world application profiling. It's quite the opposite -- CPU is relatively rarely a limiting factor in desktop applications, dealing with the HDD very often is.
This is very often why adding more memory to a system makes it seem more responsive -- larger disk buffers, less need for disk based virtual memory.
Basically hard disks are very often *the* limitation; CPUs are fast.
"Competitors will be tested both before and after the competition to check that their caffiene levels are within an acceptable range. Expect the officials to be more pedantic this year, as everyone was disappointed when last year's gold medalist was stripped of his award after it was uncovered that he snuck 4 liters of Jolt into the event."
Like SAP?
(SAP is the largest ERP company and has had the stuff working on Linux for years.)Trademarks are registered for different categories of trade. i.e. I can trademark Apple as a new type of car and this is just fine. I could also create a new fruit drink called Unix or a toilet papaer brand called SCO with no trademark problems.
This is just pointless hubris. To quote Igor Stranvinsky, Good composers borrow, great composers steal.
This is to say that doing something original is pointless; building upon what has already been learned is the direction of progress.
All of these desktops have common elements for a reason -- it's a pretty decent way of navigating through a computer. Yes, of course innovation is nice and sometimes you want to temporarily ignore some of what you've learned to try a new angle on things, but the most certain way to fall out of any meaningful cometition is to start ignoring everything that your competitors have done right.
If you don't think that original ideas are coming out of the Linux desktop (and subsequently being copied on other platforms), then you aren't watching very carefully.
Wow, I'm floored that this was modded up to +5. Creativity alone does not make something art. I guess this is probably mostly the effect of the Slashdot crowd that would like to fancy themselves hackers and artists, but has little bearing on the world of art.
Anyway; it just happens that I was in a discussion for several hours about this last night. Here's the executive summary:
Art is something that happens by a creator when they consciously or subconsciously express something through their creation. It is an active process of expression, not something that merely has creative merit.
There's a difference between a clever technician and an artist. This isn't to say that forms not traditionally associated with art (i.e. programming) can't qualify to be art, but certainly most coding isn't art, despite requiring creativity. This same dichotomy exists in other fields -- think journalism vs. literature, graphic design vs. visual art, civil engineering vs. architecture.
Bzzt. Wrong. Nobody has ever given "millions of dollars to KDE". In fact IBM has certainly had more tangible contributions to the project.
I'm not anti-Lindows or anti-Michael, but this is a gross overstatement. To the best of my knowledge a few thousand dollars were given to the KDE League; this is a far cry from "millions". We of course appreciate the contribution, but it's important to keep things in perspective. KDE has never had a donation of anywhere close to a million dollars from any party.
(And yes, I am a KDE developer.)
Add to this the fact that most data either is (a) speed critical or (b) does not compress well. i.e. database data you normally want very quickly, same for applications. The things that fill modern home computers are media files, which are already heavily compressed.
Sadly you've missed the point of Free Software.
Ok, it seems that FirebirdSQL is based on InterBase which would potentially put it in the category of enterprisedatabases where SAP DB is. But most certainly Postgres is not in this category. Postgres is a fine database and it can be argued that it trumps MySQL and friends, but these are apples and oranges.
I'm not terribly familiar with InterBase, but for example SAP DB is in the same category as Oracle, DB2 and such. It's performance is slightly below those two, but it's safe to say it's in that category. Postgres is nice for your super-spiffy-webapplications and whatever, but drop a terabyte or two in there and see what happens. ;-)
Nope, that's in KDE :-)
It's called branding . Ask your manager about it. He'll understand.
Second, Windows has some very useful and well thought out features. I prefer to substitue copy with learned from. Windows has certainly borrowed many things from Unix land; we shouldn't be too arragant to learn from the things that they've done right.
The last, is a resounding, yes, we do aim to innovate and produce and authentic Unix desktop with all that is entailed by that. I think one of the most innovative examples of this is something like the KDE IO Slaves, which extend the Unix metaphor of everything is a file to exverything is a URL. Being able to use your file browser to copy things directly from an audio cd to a remove machine via scp -- all transparently -- is *really* cool, and I think very Unix like. Or how about regular expression support in many find type of places, or rather nice console, IRC, GPG apps; the list goes on.
For all of the talk about KDE being Windows like -- remember that it's developed by old-school Linux/Unix guys. We're all very comfortable at the CLI; the debate between XEmacs and Vim is a vigorous here as anywhere. KDE is and will remain an Open Source *nix desktop; ideally making such an environment so usable as to bring this environment we know and love to folks that traditionally wouldn't be able to use it.
No, this certainly isn't surprising. Redhat has always been bad about this, indeed in getting along well with KDE in general, the notable exception being Bero, who left Redhat full of sincere frustration over the worsening of the situation. He was the guy that typically produced the Redhat packages. I know that there's a new guy who's doing their KDE packaging, but I have no idea if he / Redhat intends to release updated KDE packages.
Actually this is pretty easy if your keyboard is configured properly in X. You need to have it set to using a pc104 keyboard instead of the standard pc101. After that, mapping the key in the KDE shortcuts menu works beautifully.
Giving to schools is a fine thing and needn't be exclusive to helping out KDE. In fact if every active KDE core developer were given a new computer, this at most might be enough for one school. In this case, there are probably about 20-ish (or less) core developers that could use upgrades. We're not talking about big numbers here.
Now lets say that one school switches to KDE / Open Source from MS desktops. The cost savings in that alone outweigh the cost of diverting machines which might have gone to schools to KDE developers. In fact there have been a good handful of schools switch to KDE based desktops -- dragging an Open Source envirionment with all of its Free tools and such behind it.
Remember the ideal is for people pushing technology in schools to keep in mind both hardware and software concerns; this is a partnership, not a competition. When you send in your hardware donation I'll even be glad to direct it to a KDE Edu developer.
It does not matter what they say on their page; if they have in fact released the project under the GPL, it can be used for commercial projects royalty free -- as long as those commercial users also uphold the GPL.
It is true that the copyright holder can release it under any license that they want to. This has nothing to do with that. If however they make their software available under an unmodified GPL -- which does permit commercial use -- then they can not modify that with another statement. Again, if they're releasing it under the GPL, it can be used for commercial use.
Trolltech was [mis-]used as an example. Trolltech, by releasing their code under the GPL does allow Qt's commercial use, royalty free, so long as the software that links to it conforms to the GPL -- in this case meaning that said software is also under the GPL.
However, said programmers can dual-license the code under the GPL (which allows for GPL compliant commercial use) and anything else. In this case, what Trolltech does is makes it so that owners of commercial licenses do not have to release their code in compliance with the GPL -- i.e. they don't have to release their code at all.
Oh, did I mention that the GPL allows commercial use? ;-)
You have 30 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em!
Porting or developing their own projects -- JFS is an often pointed to as an example
Sponsoring developers of Open Source projects -- I know at least one KDE developer that was paid to write a series of tutorials on KParts that were published on IBM's web site . I recently saw something by the founder of Gentoo Linux as well.
Public Relations -- This is the big one. IBM lends Open Source and Linux more credability than any other company. They throw more resources into promoting Linu x than any other company. At a time where most major tech companies are at the most passively supporting Linux, IBM is very actively promoting it, and it's the reason that a lot of other major players are paying attention to Linux
Again, you can't underestimate the effects that having IBM backing Linux has in a corporate environment. Intel and AMD are paying attention because of IBM, and I'd be that a lot of a big part of why MS has taken note of Linux lately is that competing with Linux means competing with IBM.
So yes, they're contributing back, but the most significant ways are not the conventional methods. They're in fact contributing something to Linux that no number of hackers can -- credibility.
Really, I'm not trying to flame, but this is Open Source, and I will repeat the thing that has been said several times: We do this in our spare time. Please don't complain about what we do in our spare time.
This isn't to say that you can't get the bug fixed.
Report it!: (Too many people don't realize that reporting bugs is important and valued!)
Fix it yourself: Hey, that's what this is all about! This is the developers section, and a thread about a development tool. You've got the source, go for it!
Pay someone to fix it: Seriously. Everyone thinks this a catch all, but many of the KDE developers, myself included would be willing to fix bugs for a modest price. Put EUR/$ 50 behind your request, and it's likely to happen! Hell, send a 6 pack of beer and you're likely to have a new friend.
I'm just trying to put this in perspective. The KDE devopers specifically, and most OSS developers in general do this for fun in their spare time. And here's another little secret: there aren't many of us. I would guess that 90% of the Open Source software that currently being worked on is developed by less than 500 people (That's just developers; there are a lot of wonderful translators and documentors out there too.).
We really try to produce great software, and in fact I think we succeed, but if you care about the stuff, please, help out! Donate something: time, money, hardware, whatever. It will be infinitely more appreciated and fruitful than complaining on Slashdot.
If patents only covered a single implementation of an invention, this would defeat the purpose that patents do and always have had.
Patents cover an idea -- an invention. In fact the idea of patents is that it produces a way to license that invention to other manufacturers, who of course will differ in the details of implementation.
By me saying a hardware patent I was attempting to differentiate between software patents. This is not a patent on an algorightm -- math -- but rather a patent on a way to build a specific type of hardware (and indeed an inovative one at that). If you want to build that type of hardware, as Intel does, you must license the patent from the patent holder.
Basically, all patents are patents on ideas: hardware, software, gumball machines. There is no such thing as patents on a specific implementation. The closest thing that I guess you might be getting mixed up with is copyright law for media, software, etc., but that doesn't apply to physical creations. (In copyright law, you have copyright over the text, code, etc. -- the implementation not the idea.)
Here we have a typical case of the patent system working properly:
A smallish (relatively) company create an invention -- new hardware
A large company sees that, likes it, and decides to copy that invention
The smaller company sues for patent infringement, because hey, the big company didn't invent this
This is how things are supposed to work. Software patents are a completely different thing, but here we have a non-trivial hardware inovation that was patented and that patent was infringed upon. Please don't lump the two together under patent reform.
KDE users/gesture lovers give it a whirl! I currently have gestures mapped to start up Konq, Konsole and to lock my screen.
Yes, it's being developed in KDE CVS and will be available for free to all when it's done.
Because the government is stupid enough to buy it.
If the government pays for research and development of GPL'ed software, they are ensuring that the government, US citizens, and US corporations will always be free to use the fruits of that work, even after it has been extended. That's how I would prefer my tax dollars to be spent, thanks.
You're making a subtle flaw here. A BSD license would insure that you got everything that your taxes paid for and could then do anything that you want to with it. It wouldn't insure you that you would get access to things that your tax dollars didn't pay for.
Trust me, I would love to see all government funded software released under the GPL, which is what all of my software is under (well, some LGPL). However, I don't think that you can make a convincing argument that GPL'ed software is any more right for the government to produce than BSD'd software. In fact, as much as I would like to see the software GPL'ed, I think in this case (as much as it pains me to agree with Bill Gates) it is more fair to release the software under something closer to public domain like the BSD license, if not just putting it in the public domain. After all, shouldn't publicly produced software be, well, public?
But they don't sell software. Sure they make a nominal amount of money off of selling boxes-o-software, but you just can't really sell something to geeks very easily that they can download.
I think that a marketing shift like they're doing is trying to funnel more people into the parts of their business model that allow them to hire that many people. Pretty much they're a huge consulting firm that just happens to find it convenient to maintain a distro that they have control over.